Four hundred and ninety-two years between the fall of Constantinople and the start of World War II in Europe, there were 273 armed conflicts between national groups in western Europe, an average of almost one war every two years. In the 74 years since World War II ended, there have been a grand total of zero. Just to be clear, my definition of armed conflict here does not include uprisings such as the troubles in Northern Ireland, the Cold Wars (in which just one engineer was killed in three “wars”), or the coups in Portugal.
Why has Europe witnessed such an outbreak of peace which goes against their own history?
Most of the blame for this lies at the feet of one man. His name was George Catlett Marshall, and he was US Secretary of State from 1947 to 1949, a period during which he introduced the eponymous Marshall Plan to redevelop western Europe, and especially west Germany, with American money.
At the end of Hitler’s war, Europe was in chaos, 50 million Europeans were homeless and starving, and it was hard to get around. No one knew what would happen to Germany. Joseph Stalin, the soviet dictator, had a fair idea; he wanted to destroy Germany and turn the whole place into a farm, so it would never be able to again threaten Russia. But at the same time, communists, who bought into Stalin’s ideology, were threatening to take over in some of the ruined countries of Europe. Italy, Greece, and even France.
After yet another failed meeting to determine the future of Germany, Marshall, who coincidentally was the US Army’s Chief of Staff during the war, and had in that capacity, been responsible for the destruction of a huge portion of German infrastructure, decided that the best way to prevent your enemy from ever being able to fight you, was to build him up. To that end, and over opposition from many members of congress, he instructed staffers in the state department to draw up plans for the development of the American, British and French-controlled sectors of Germany.
The Brits and the French, despite their own objections and historical animus with the Germans, had no choice but to go along since the war had destroyed their own countries as well, and they were dependent on the Americans to rebuild.
The result, after a short period of soviet opposition which included a failed blockade of west Berlin, was that west Germany rose from the ashes of the war and became the industrial powerhouse that it is today. Further, the establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor to today’s European Union (EU), followed the pattern of encouraging greater economic integration in Europe. Indeed, the very first supranational post-war European body, the European Coal and Steel Community, was predicated on the fact that by being able to monitor each other’s outputs of coal and steel, members would be able to tell when one member had shifted onto a war footing.
This worked so well, that it eventually grew into the EEC, and then became the EU. The result of all this economic integration in western Europe was that when in 1990 it was time for reunification of western and eastern Germany, it was on the west’s terms, and not the east.
How is this relevant to Nigeria?
In 1970, our own war ended, and we declared NVNV (no victor no vanquished). A plan was instituted to rebuild the shattered South-East under Ukpabi Asika, and to his credit, he did his best. However, as with most things Nigerian, our own brand of politics came into play, and we began to self-sabotage. It all began with the ports. Nigeria in the 1960s, had two economic corridors, the Western Economic Corridor (better known as LAKAJI these days), and the Eastern Economic Corridor.
By acts of omission and commission, including it must be said, acts of neglect by local leaders starting with the recession of 1981, the Eastern Economic Corridor began to deteriorate. Most federal attention was paid to the LAKAJI corridor which runs from Lagos through Kano, to Jibiya on the border with Niger in Katsina State, while the Eastern corridor, which runs from Port Harcourt, through Enugu, to Maiduguri, was left to go fallow.
That was a grave error, which has shown how the law of unintended consequences works.
The first unintended consequence of the neglect of the Eastern corridor is the congestion of Lagos’ ports. Those ports – Apapa and Tin Can Island – serve the 1,225 km LAKAJI corridor which encompasses Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Kwara, Kogi, Niger, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, and Jigawa – an area with a combined GDP of $119.7 billion in 2010. When compared with Nigeria’s 2010 GDP of $369 billion, this implies that the hobbled and hitherto deprioritised ports of the Eastern Economic Corridor had a GDP of $249.3 billion in 2010, almost twice the size of the LAKAJI corridor, and as a result serves a larger slice of the country’s economy.
The second unintended consequence is this; it is not an accident that until the last four years, almost all of Nigeria’s primary security challenges were concentrated along the EEC. Think Niger Delta militancy, the pastoral conflict, the first wave of kidnappings, Maitatsine, Boko Haram. When people do not trade with each other, as we saw in Europe, they end up fighting with each other. And without free access to goods and services, resentment quickly builds, which in turn leads to conflict.
For Nigeria to grow and eventually thrive, we need to, as a matter of urgency, begin to place emphasis on the Eastern Economic Corridor. The country needs it desperately.
Happy Independence Day.
CHETA NWANZE
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